ABSTRACT
Waking up to our four-year-old, Connor, at the side of the bed needing help before six o’clock in the morning can be a challenge. He is dressed in an orange T-shirt, green combat trousers and red Converse boots, trying to attach a Spiderman tie around his neck. It is the conundrum of his ‘back facing the wrong way’ that wakes me fully as I am intrigued as to what he means – until I realise that he is referring to tying his tie. With a moment’s longing for his earliest years, I am overawed to think of what he still does not know. This sends a wave of maternal comfort through me. Later the same day, I reflect on the significance of our early morning scene. That orange T-shirt is the one he chooses to wear on his adventures with his granddad. The combat trousers are his ‘work trousers’, the ones he wears to help daddy chop wood, and the shoes are the ‘weekend shoes’ allowed as an alternative to his black school shoes. With no emerging sense of fashion, he has clothed himself in his dearest experiences. The Spiderman tie was his favourite Christmas present last year. As his mother, the knowledge that he has these memories to inspire his dress sense is endearing, but the fact that he has such emotional attachments to his everyday life is far more precious. As a practitioner, I can pick out the developmental significance of many aspects of our morning’s conversation. Bruner describes how a child’s social environment impacts on who they become. He says, ‘Man is not a naked ape but a culture-clothed human being, hopelessly ineffective without the prosthesis provided by culture’.1
